


figures 1-5: killing gods

by zeitgeistofnow



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: 5 + 1 Things, Character Study, Descriptions of murder, Discussions of Political Systems, Dreams, Extended Metaphors, M/M, Slight Canon Divergence, in a 'the author was thinking about killing god' way, lots of vauge metaphors and SO much symbolism, umm religion but not in a religious way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:29:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24815362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeitgeistofnow/pseuds/zeitgeistofnow
Summary: uncle iroh said once that no one has power over you unless you let them.we create our own gods,he says,and that makes us their masters. It is not the other way around, zuko. don’t forget this.(an incomplete, non-alphabetized collection of zuko's dreams.)
Relationships: Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 31
Kudos: 135





	figures 1-5: killing gods

fig. 1: killing god as vengeance.

Zuko walks around for three years with nothing but white hot heat between his ears. His father’s fire had dissipated long ago, long enough that the scar was the only thing left of it, but something of it must have seeped into his mind, raging through his flesh and bone and finding a home in his limbic system. He doesn’t think he minds. Anger makes him feel more powerful- as powerful?- as he is, makes his fires burn brighter and quicker and hotter. Anger makes him whole again. 

He loses the Avatar again- he should be happy that the Avatar is back, that his quest is not nearly as hopeless as he sees in his Uncle’s eyes- but all he feels is a dark rage. He goes to sleep and dreams about his hand, coal hot, hovering above the eye of someone whose face flickers between his father and the Avatar and Zhao and his sister and his mother, rage and despair and acceptance flickering through all their faces in turn.

Uncle Iroh said once that _no one has power over you unless you let them. We create our own gods,_ he says, _and that makes us their masters. It is not the other way around, Zuko. Don’t forget this._

He holds his hand just a little bit closer to his sister’s face and watches with detached interest when she snarls at his fingers. “What about when they created you?” He whispers to her and she becomes Ozai. 

It would be something of an exaggeration to call his father a _god,_ but he’s hardly human either. Zuko’s scar is a constantly bypassed example of that. What father would- what god would do that to their creation? Zuko was molded from fresh clay and he was fired in the heat of battle and it didn’t take anything more than banishment to crack him.

Prometheus gave his clay-children fire and their god took it away. Zuko remembers the story. Cruel gods are nothing new. 

Finally Zuko thrusts his hand against his father’s face. He looks away. He doesn’t relish the crackling noise flesh makes when it burns, and when he looks back his mother is there again, her face perfectly unblemished.

When he wakes up, pulls on his uniform, goes to the deck, he is twice as determined to regain his honor and no one, not even Uncle Iroh, understands why.

Zuko’s father is dead to him. His honor is all he has left and he’ll be _damned_ if he kills the last thing keeping him alive. 

fig. 2: killing god as a coming of age.

He never realizes how much the ponytail was pulling his head until he chops it off. The way it’s positioned on his head naturally tilts his chin up, turning his nose up at everything in an accident of posture. Now he hangs his head to watch the long hair float in a pond next to his uncle’s.

Uncle Iroh hands him a razor to shave off the rest of his hair and leaves him to be. Zuko is grateful. Zuko is ungrateful too, though, as a semi-permanent facet of his personality, and part of him cries out at the fact that his uncle is no longer immediately at his side. 

Zuko hangs his head to watch his shorn hair float, watches his honor disappear with the passing wind. 

_We make them our gods_ , he reminds himself as he shaves off the last few hairs off his scalp, _and we can unmake them. Honor is nothing but complacency with a halo and flaming sword._ The words burn, unspoken, on his tongue, and Zuko swallows them.

That night he dreams of nothing but an empty ocean, somehow infinitely larger and smaller than the pond outside. There is something discarded in the middle that Zuko can only define as a fallen angel, something contorted and sneering. Zuko feels a stab of self-disgust that he ever strove after something so useless and the dream moves on. 

fig. 3: killing god as a mercy.

The Avatar- Aang- is a child. He is a _child,_ younger even than Zuko was when he was banished, and he looks at Zuko with eyes that are unimaginably heavy. Zuko doesn’t think the rest of the gaang notices the world resting on his shoulders, but- well, it takes one to know one. 

“Do you think you’re ready?” Zuko asks. It’s been a long day of firebending, retracing the same few steps over and over again until Aang decided he understood the move and was ready for the rest. Zuko’s calves ache and he stretches them in front of him. Aang stays cross-legged. He looks contemplative. The Avatar always look contemplative. Zuko wonders what he has to think about that the rest of them don’t. 

“No,” Aang finally admits, and the word hangs between them like the heaviest feather in the world. At least he knows. Zuko never quite let himself think his inadequacy out loud. “It’s scary,” he adds, eyes closed like he’s meditating. 

“Will you be?” Zuko prods. He doesn’t know what answer he’s looking for. He’s one of the good guys, he’ll be prosecuted for treason, strung up in a town square with the rest of them, so _of course_ he needs the Avatar to say he’ll be ready. Of course he wants Aang to smile blindingly at him and say that he’s sure the next few weeks will be transformative, that he’ll be ready to save the world and everyone in it when the time comes. He wants Aang to be something new he can worship at the feet of, something to put his hope into. 

But at the same time, Zuko’s been prepared for martyrdom since he shaved his head for the last time. It’s what he deserves: to die for the same cause he raged against only a few months ago. So he watches Aang uncertainly, and the Avatar bites his lip. 

“Yes. No- I don’t. I hope so. If I’m not it won’t really matter, anyway.” Something flashes in Aang’s eyes. Something bright and hard that shouldn’t be inside a twelve year old. “I’m a _god,_ Zuko. No one can kill me, not in a way that matters. It’ll only be a few years until someone else will be born to fail again. I was _born_ to be a martyr and I’m not scared of that.” He shrugs, and the glint in his eyes is gone. “I dunno. What’s gonna happen is gonna happen. Guess we’ll find out.” He hops to his feet and offers Zuko a hand.

Zuko doesn’t take it, just hauls himself to his feet and dusts off his pants with one hand.

“You’re not afraid of death either,” Aang says, and it’s not a question. “That’s chill. You’d save them, right? Sokka and Katara and Toph. Even if it means that everything- you know.”

Zuko doesn’t know. He’s sixteen. He knows, distantly, that he should be bottling feelings about the way boys shine in the sun after a sparring match, should be sleeping through classes on military history. He shouldn’t be deciding if his friends' lives are more important than the world. “Yes,” he says, because it’s what Aang wants to hear. “Let’s go to bed, though. Everyone else is long asleep.”

Zuko curls on his sleeping mat and stares at his swords, gently sheathed and lying on the ground half an arm’s reach again. 

He dreams about the Avatar beneath him, his swords crossed above his neck. Fire rages around them and Zuko knows- by the smell, acrid and harsh- that it’s not his or Aang’s or his father’s, but some conglomerate of every evil firebender he’s ever met. _Your fire goes sour when you do,_ Uncle Iroh always says, _your gods burn with you._

Aang’s eyes are closed lightly. He doesn’t look scared, just… sad. Not at Zuko, or at the fire surrounding them. Zuko wonders, not for the first time, what the air temple must have been like a hundred years ago. _Do you wish I could live a normal life?_ Aang asks, but his mouth doesn’t move. _Do you wish you could save me from myself?_

Zuko looks up and Avatar Roku is there, somehow both miles above Zuko and eye level with him. _We are the closest thing there is to a benevolent god in this world,_ he says, _but none of us chose it. You don’t choose to become someone’s protector. You can’t save him without dooming everyone else too._

 _“We didn’t deserve it,”_ Zuko screams, but his voice comes from the flames surrounding them. 

_Go on,_ Avatar Roku hums. _Kill him. Let him escape the responsibilities that have been thrust upon him. Watch how the world screams._

Zuko slices his arms apart, the expertly sharpened blades sliding through skin and bone just like they do water, and the fire licking at their heels shrieks louder than Zuko could ever imagine.

fig. 4: killing god as a sacrifice.

Zuko and Sokka fall together as the world rebuilds itself. They hold each other among the ashes and go hand in hand toward the efforts to create something better out of the burnt and broken remnants. 

Sokka stays in the Fire Nation with Zuko as his aides sort through the procession traditions. They sleep in suites connected by a bathroom and Zuko’s aides comment that they’re glad he’s found a friend his own age. Sokka follows him to emergency meetings, to rallies, to the palace gardens late at night.

The gardens are beautiful in their unnaturalness. The fire nation has always prized its ability to take nature and cage it, conjuring and dissipating fire in their fist, breeding tigerdillos for their docility and releasing them on their enemies. And putting trees in pots, their roots trimmed and kept just as short as they can to be for survival. Bushes set into the stone ground, flowers planted alongside earthbent statues of past Fire Lords. 

Zuko sits on a shining marble bench. Sokka sits next to him a moment later. His blue robes fall gently over the edge of the bench and he puts a hand to the small of Zuko’s back, staring out at the piteous mockery of a forest. His robes are made of the same light silk that all Fire Nation robes are made of- the Water Tribe robes he had been wearing were dramatically too warm for the palace. Zuko had ordered the silk dyed blue for Sokka- to match his eyes- and the way Sokka’s face had lit up in gratitude had been worth anything else Zuko could have done.

“Rough day, huh?” Sokka says, and Zuko shakes his head.

“It was fine. You know it was fine, you were there.” It was fine _because_ you were there, Zuko thinks but doesn’t say. Sokka seems to pick up on it anyway and his face breaks into a small smile.

“You’re doing incredible,” Sokka says softly and the words hum between them in the moonlight. Zuko doesn’t know what to say. _Thank you,_ he thinks, and the words taste underwhelming. _You don’t know how I’m doing,_ he thinks, and dismisses the phrase as aggressive and self-pitying. “Only because of you,” he finally says. 

Sokka’s smile melts into a soft gaze and he raises a hand to caress Zuko’s jaw. Zuko leans pathetically into the touch. He feels like he’s being healed. 

Sokka looks gorgeous in the moonlight, warm brown skin turned cool and shining, the seashells at his neck an iridescent rainbow. Zuko _knows_ he shouldn’t be watching the way the silvery light dances on the other boy’s hair. God knows Zuko could get away with as many war crimes as he wanted but kissing boys is a transgression that wouldn’t go uncommented on. Zuko _knows,_ but golden apples are meant to be tasted, not admired.

“You look…” Zuko looks for the right word. “Godlike,” he decides, and Sokka kisses him softly. 

Zuko hums quietly into his mouth, raising his hands to pull Sokka closer, letting his mouth open just a little against the other boy’s lips. Sokka obliges to his royal demands, presses closer and bites at Zuko’s lower lips, hands carding through his hair and tracing the edge of his scar. Zuko moans at the touch and can’t even find it in himself to be disgusted with his indecency.

There would be hell raised if someone found them like this but Sokka’s mouth on his neck is a goddamn religious experience and Zuko will be damned if he cares about anything else. 

They find their way back to their suite, half stumbling, drunk on the wine of something new that hasn’t been created through hours of careful pouring over treaty language. Zuko falls asleep next to the other boy. Their limbs curl between each other’s like fire around a bush. He feels like he should be burning him, like if he gets too close Sokka will fall into ashes. He never does.

Zuko dreams about a stage, about a golden set and a critical audience. Zuko climbs the steps of an altar. He is holding a knife and the audience is watching him warily. Their accusing looks make him hide the weapon behind his back. It burns where it touches his spine. 

Sokka sits at the top, draped in gold and silver, jewelry that he would never accept in real life. His eyes are closed. The people Zuko cares about never look at him in dreams. 

_“You cannot afford temptation,”_ The crowd screams at his back. Sokka beckons to Zuko and Zuko comes like he’s being pulled. Sokka lifts his chin and kisses him deeply and something in Zuko breaks. The other boy tastes like ashes and something sticky-sweet. The real Sokka tastes faintly of fish, but mostly wintergreen mint. He keeps a stash in his robes at all times. It’s a clean taste. 

_“You have so much good you need to do,”_ the crowd shrieks. Their robes and hair fall away and they become magpies, picking at the riches surrounding Zuko and Sokka. _“Kill him. Kill him. Kill him. You cannot afford the temptation. Your rule must remain untarnished. Kill-”_

And Zuko screams with them and plunges the knife into Sokka’s back. 

Zuko wakes and Sokka wakes a moment later, splaying a gentle hand over Zuko’s chest on instinct. “What’s wrong,” Sokka whispers. His voice is raspy with sleep and his hair is down and waterfalling over his forehead. Zuko wants to brush it away. Instead, he disentangles his legs from Sokka’s and moves the other boy’s hand. He points to the bathroom door.

“You can’t be here,” he murmurs. “I can’t allow myself to be caught as anything less than perfect. You will leave for the South Pole in the morning. I cannot allow myself the temptation.”

Sokka’s gaze hardens but there’s something understanding in his eyes. Zuko can’t decide if that’s a good thing. He looks away.

fig. 5: killing god to destroy his throne.

Zuko ascends to his crown as it is laid on his head, his coronation an ordeal that only serves to remind him of a thousand injustices committed by people who wore the same title as he does now. He sits on a throne, in peace councils, at his desk in his quarters late at night. He doesn’t feel the power that hovers around him as anything but another weight on his shoulders. 

For years his power was in his bending and when it wasn’t it was in the ways he could use his sword or his tongue, biting steel and words. Things that he worked for, things he trusted himself to use in the right ways.

And now the crown is placed on his head and he has thousands of wars worth of intangible power. He understands what to do with it. He knows the right things to say, how to curtsey and add useful things to negotiations, how to sign treaties and ceed land back to the people who lived there first. He knows how to rule, how to use the power the way it was created to be used.

It doesn’t feel like enough. He wears the robes every day and knows that they have been worn by tyrants. He is walking miles and miles in their shoes and it feels wrong.

 _What good can I do with this title that cannot be undone?_ he writes Sokka, _how can I stop the next Fire Lord from destroying everything we’ve worked for? This much power is corrupting, and_ ~~_I don’t know_~~ _I hardly think I could be a good enough father to guarantee an absolute monarchy free of tyrants for generations. There is so much corruption in my bloodline, Sokka. How can I do good with a crown that has been used for evil for so long?_ Zuko stares at his own penmanship and sighs. He finishes the letter on a more lighthearted note and sends well-wishes to Sokka’s sister, then seals it carefully and hands it to their hardiest carrier pigeon. The flight to the south pole is hardly a short one. 

He goes to bed, slips between the silk covers stretched neatly over his mattress by one of the palace’s maids. A stack of political theory books sits at his bedside table, a candle with only an inch of wax left standing guard on top of them. Zuko leaves them be and drifts to sleep in fits and starts.

He sits next to his father in his dream, back straight and eyes cold. He is somehow both inhabiting his body and standing a few feet away, watching this other him smile brittlely. The part of Zuko that is part of the tableau feels cold across his left eye, icy stillness where the numbness of his scar is supposed to be. It’s only smooth skin, a wholeness to his face that comes with an incompleteness in his life.

The true Zuko steps forward into the light, hand unconsciously reaching to his burn. He knows that’s the wrong choice as soon as he does it. His father doesn’t _like_ when his prince brings attention to those particular memories, although this Zuko has never been a prince by his father’s side and the other Zuko has no scar to mar his empty face. 

Still, Zuko flinches when his father’s gaze lands on him. _“Dismissed,”_ Ozai says.

Scarless Zuko steps off the throne to stand next to his other self. Their father disappears, replaced with a crowned Azulon and a younger Ozai. They both look just as severe as the scarless Zuko and his father had. They look like rulers. 

Azulon shakes his head lightly and they are replaced by Sozin and Azulon, then Sozin and a man Zuko doesn’t know, then more and more generations until the throne disappears entirely and it’s only Zuko and his scarless self staring at each other. 

_“You’re so full of yourself,”_ Scarless Zuko sneers, and the walls feel disdainful. _“You think you can redeem the throne after so many years of corruption? Tyranny is built into the palace walls. The iron we make our ships of is melded in the kiln of fascism, the stone floors you walk on every day built by complictness, the throne a testament to the murder of innocents. You arrogant bastard, you think you can change all that in the sixty-seven years you will rule?”_

 _“I don’t-”_ Zuko starts, but the walls stop him, pressing against his vocal chords without moving at all.

 _“Even you still want the crown’s power,”_ Scarless Zuko continues, his expression morphing from emptiness to the rage that Zuko saw in the mirror every day for years. _“You want to feel like all those years of training in the palace could be used for good. You killed your father and your honor and your hope and love and then you took your newfound virtue and made it god and you sacrifice the good of your citizens at its altar.”_ His voice is biting and the walls close in even as they stay right where they have always been. _“You will never be good enough for the throne, Zuko, and the throne will never have anyone’s best interests at heart but yours.”_ The walls close the final inch and the pair is crushed by stone that is still yards away from them on either side. Zuko wakes up sweating, every candle in the room lit and glowing harshly. 

fig. 6: creating god as yourself.

Zuko abdicates the throne, destroying it with a stray fireball as he stands up for the last time. It’s a largely symbolic measure, but it certainly sends the intended message. He leaves the planning of a new system of government to his advisors, a collection of men and women who have spent their lives studying systems of law. They look… bemused when he offers the Fire Nation at their feet, but they present him models and failsafes and Zuko does his best to understand. He spends even more nights reading theory books, scanning the same sentence over and over until he understands it. 

He takes baths, too, in scalding hot water than leaves his skin red and tingling when he steps out. The process is soothing and Uncle Iroh always said that there’s no place for self discovery like a hot spring. In retrospect, Zuko supposes, that may have been a sex joke, but the theory holds still. 

Zuko’s mind goes a little fuzzy in the heat and he lets his hands run over every scar he’s accumulated, steaming water pouring off him with every movement of his hand. There’s always both more and less than he expects. He is always more and less than he anticipates.

He towels off, watching the steam dissipate through a now-open window, and slips a new robe over his shoulders. Sokka waits for him in his chambers, reading some archaic tome about hunting. He goes on trips, sometimes, and brings home meat for the kitchens. They always accept it with a bemused look to Zuko and serve it to them that night.

It keeps Sokka feeling useful. It makes Zuko wish that he could do more than tuck himself into the other man’s side and remind him that his worth is not based on how much he does for others. 

Sokka presses a kiss to Zuko’s temple when he slides into bed next to him and Zuko runs a fond hand through his hair. Zuko reaches over the other man for the top book from his stack and flips it open to his leather bookmark. A few more trade agreements he needs to look over are tucked into the pages, and Zuko sighs and puts them aside. 

“Bringing work home again?” Sokka asks. He sounds amused, not bitter, and the tension that Zuko’s shoulders had conjured disappears. 

“I have to be good enough for _this._ ” Zuko says, starting to draw his finger down the page, trying to decide where he left off. “I couldn’t be good enough for the throne- that’s okay,” he reassures himself, “that’s okay,” he reassures Sokka, “but I _have_ to be good enough for this.”

“Why?” Sokka asks, closing his book and putting a hand on Zuko’s arm.

Sometimes Zuko feels his old rage flicker up, white heat licking at his sternum, the base of his lungs. “For the _nation._ For every person down there. We are creating a new _world,_ Sokka, so don’t you dare tell me that I need to-”

“No,” Sokka says, and the flames in Zuko’s abdomen leap up his throat and melt away. “Why do you have to be the one who’s better than you already are?”

Zuko inhales, then exhales. Sparks come with his breath, dancing away in the air. One lands on the sheets but Sokka bats it out without a thought. “Because I have killed all of my gods, Sokka," and the words come from somewhere in Zuko that he's never spoken from. "I have killed everything that I worshipped because I was never meant to worship with anything other than cult like devotion and I know that’s not healthy. I know that I have to be better so that I can be something worthy of my own reverence.” He makes a half choked noise and flips through the pages of his book. "I have to be good enough that I won't destroy myself too."

Sokka stares at him for a long moment, then takes one of Zuko’s hands and intertwines their fingers, then pulls them apart. Their hands dance together like performers, like flames. “You are already deserving of exaltation,” he says softly, “but I wouldn’t like to be the one to tell you that your way of recovering is any worse than mine. You don’t need to be a god to be worthy of adoration.”

“I don’t deserve you,” Zuko says, voice just as soft. They are speaking something into existence, some version of life that Zuko can’t quite grasp. 

“On the contrary,” Sokka yawns, “the world doesn't deserve your slaughter.”

Zuko doesn’t dream that night.

**Author's Note:**

> \- ok so i wrote this over the course of like... three nights. only after midnight. i tried writing during the day and straight up got feverish so i had to stop.  
> \- i know that there is no concept of gods in avatar but i Don't Care. i wanted to write about killing god so i DID.  
> \- most of these metaphors are actual metaphors and the dreams (especially the sokka one) are chock full of symbolism so if you're wondering my thoughts abt anything PLEASE ask in the comments i love explaining my thoughts. that said some of the metaphors are just me squishing words together until they sound good so like.  
> \- i think zuko deserves good things..  
> \- you can find me on tumblr [@lazypigeon](https://lazypigeon.tumblr.com/).  
> \- comments and kudos make my day!! if you enjoyed this please tell me :)


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